Making Android Beautiful with ActionBarSherlock

Until recently, Android design lacked definition and we had to fend for attractive apps as best we could. Now with Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich, Google has shaped up and come out with an awesome design vision for the platform. For 3.0+, beauty can be native and the Action Bar is the new standard.
Read More - http://tech.xtremelabs.com/making-android-beautiful-with-actionbarsherlock/

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At Xtreme Labs, we often build apps that interact with a large address book. Contacts are necessary if the user wants to share their favorite product to a friend, or send an article through email. To ensure we handle the worst edge cases, we need to test with a large number of contacts. Of course, it’s very inefficient to have an intern manually input all the contacts onto a device (and our interns have more important things to do!). Fortunately, we found a way to load all the contacts in a sh

I’ve just returned home from Microsoft’s annual Build conference, which they held at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, WA. Before I attended the conference, I have to admit, I didn’t think Microsoft really “got it” when it came to mobile. I must also admit that I am a bit of an Apple fan boy, having switched to a Mac 5 years ago and have been rocking an iPhone since the introduction of the 3G. With the launch of Windows 8, it seemed to me that to Microsoft, tablets are simply smaller PCs, and that a mo

Xtreme Labs is excited to announce its continuing partnership with Karmaloop, with the recently-launched PLNDR iPhone app for exclusive members-only flash sales on the go. With the app, customers can make purchases from wherever they are, creating a fun, easy, and convenient way to shop for deals that sell out quickly. The PLNDR app reaches customers who can’t always shop online, which takes advantage of user’s desire to get a great item for a great price when the clock is ticking.

For an extreme retailer, only an extreme app developer would do. Xtreme Labs is excited to announce that we’ve launched the Miss KL app for iPhone. Miss KL is a brand-new women’s only division of Karmaloop, the online destination for streetwear fashion.

The intensity of downtown Toronto’s rush-hour pedestrian traffic pales in comparison to the electric work environment of Xtreme Labs. After some time, most XL employees will get up to speed with our fast-paced work environment, but I clearly remember being overwhelmed on my first day as an Agile Engineer at our downtown Toronto office.

Last August, the iOS developer community discovered a small change with potentially large implications that came with the introduction of iOS 5.0: the deprecation of the UDID. The UDID is a highly used unique identifier for each iOS device; somewhat like a social security number for your phone or tablet.

With the recent release of the new iPad, app resources (images, videos, etc.) will be significantly larger. Apple has raised the 3G app download to 50mb to compensate for the larger images, but it may still be a tight squeeze. This is
especially true for universal apps that have to support low and high resolutions of iPhones, iPods, and now the iPads. Often during the construction of an app we will go through many revisions to the UI, moving new assets in and out of the app. In this confusion,

Understanding your development tools allow you to spend less time writing boilerplate code and solving the same problems over and over again. Here are seven tools every Android developer should familiarize themselves with to make their workflow more efficient and solve new problems.

To build working iOS apps quickly and painlessly I have often leveraged open source libraries. It’s important to avoid reinventing the wheel every time your app needs to hit the network, use common UI, socially share content, etc. People have listed libraries before (here, here, and here), I wanted to highlight some that lean more towards dev tools than front facing user features

I recently worked on an Android app that parsed large amounts of JSON-formatted data. We would routinely allocate 20 or 30 kilobytes of heap space for Strings of JSON-formatted text retrieved from a server. We’d pass the strings to the Android framework’s JSONObject class in order to construct our data models. After downloading many objects in a short amount of time we discovered that we were frequently running out of memory and decided that we needed a different strategy to parse the content

In my recent project, we were asked to build a hybrid app which incorporates native Android UI with web components. In our past experience, iOS has a very extensive library of handling all web views, which led us to believe that Android would also provide something similar. However, after days of experimenting on Android WebViews, we found it acts quite differently from the UIWebView class in iOS.

Facebook iOS SDK 3.0 makes it easier for developers to integrate Facebook into their mobile applications. This new release comes with a host of major updates, from FBSession which lets an app manage the user’s session with ease to a bunch of smaller features like making it easier to create basic API calls to the Facebook OpenGraph. This version of the SDK also introduces blocks for a cleaner handling of various calls to Facebook.

What is the savedInstanceState Bundle?
The savedInstanceState is a reference to a Bundle object that is passed into the onCreate method of every Android Activity. Activities have the ability, under special circumstances, to restore themselves to a previous state using the data stored in this bundle. If there is no available instance data, the savedInstanceState will be null. For example, the savedInstanceState will always be null the first time an Activity is started, but may be non-null if a